Enclosure, Creevy, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a gently rolling field on the edge of bog country in County Mayo, there is a site that exists now only on paper.
A circular enclosure, roughly twenty metres across, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, the great early Victorian effort to document the Irish landscape in systematic detail. By the time later map editions were drawn up, it had already disappeared from the cartographers' record. On the ground today, there is nothing at all to see.
Local memory fills in part of the gap. A small circular rise, somewhere between ten and fifteen metres in diameter, once sat at this location in the pasture near Creevy. During land reclamation works carried out in the 1970s or early 1980s, it was levelled. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish countryside; they range from ringforts, which were the enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, to earlier prehistoric enclosures whose original purpose is harder to pin down. Without excavation, it is rarely possible to say what a specific example once was, and in this case the physical evidence no longer exists to ask the question of. What the 1838 map captured was the last documentary trace of something that had probably stood in that field, largely unremarked, for centuries before anyone thought to write it down.